


Heart's Desire

by tielan



Category: Emily of New Moon - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Love, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:02:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after she jilted him at the altar, Ilse Burnley has to deal with Teddy Kent - now husband of her best friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart's Desire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sallyislike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallyislike/gifts).



> Thanks to my betas Voks and Laura! Your assistance, advice, and edits were very much appreciated!

Ilse isn’t nervous the first time she sees Teddy again.

“They’re not going to get here any sooner by watching, you know,” Perry tells her from behind the paper. “And don’t stick your tongue out at me.”

He folds down a corner and smirks at her, catching her with her tongue half-out. Ilse bounds across the kitchen and lands a smacking kiss on that smirk. “I thought you liked it when I stick my tongue...”

Her husband wraps an arm around her waist - he won’t be able to do that much longer - and pulls her into his lap. “Behave, woman,” he says, and the combination of teasing and severe sends shivers down Ilse’s spine. She leans into the very un-Victorian kiss with a will and a passion.

Perry’s better for her than Teddy would ever have been, something Ilse knew from the beginning. She thinks Teddy knows that now. She hopes he does.

It will be strange to have them all under the one roof again - at least it will at first - more than just the brief whirlwind glimpse they had of each other at the wedding. Ilse turned up to be the bridesmaid, resplendent in dark blue while Emily was a vision of twilight and ice - shot silk in midnight blue and silver. Teddy didn’t have eyes for anyone but Emily, and there was no time to talk because Ilse and Perry had driven down the previous night and were gone almost as soon as the ceremony was done.

Ilse wasn’t even sure she wanted to speak with Teddy then. It was Emily’s day and his. No old shadows should darken it.

For anyone else, they wouldn’t even have made the wedding.

Ilse sighs and arches a little as Perry runs a hand down her back. “It’s been years,” her husband advises. “And from their letters, he and Emily sound happy.”

“They sound boring.”

Perry laughs and kisses her throat. “Only to you. And we’re not quite the swinging type, either.” Yet he grins and squeezes her hip - just a little too low for her waist, just a little too high for her bottom. Not quite playful, but close.

Ilse tilts his head back and kisses him hard, her hands sliding over the lapels of his shirt. She’s considering brazenly luring him back to bed and Emily, Teddy, and his office be damned, but the rumble of a car down the laneway draws them apart.

She springs up, pushing back the lace curtains to see the shining lines of Teddy’s automobile, and the two dark heads inside.

Absently, she presses her palms against her thighs to dry them and then huffs at herself.

She’s given speeches before princes and politicians, declaimed everything from women’s lib to war poetry, this should be simple. What’s more, she’s known Teddy since they were kids, playing with Emily at New Moon, or out at the Tansy Patch.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Perry comes up behind her and kisses the side of her throat. “It’s not like you to hide in the kitchen.”

Ilse taps him against the cheek with three fingers - not a slap, but a sharp warning. And when she looks back from the door to the outside, her husband got his hands tucked in his trouser pockets and a smirk tucked in the corners of his mouth.

He jerks his head at the door and Ilse sticks her tongue out and goes.

There’s always been something about Emily Starr - something more than just being a Murray of New Moon.

She climbs out of the car in smoky-grey silk that ripples with the merest breeze, and her gaze sweeps across the sun-washed land as she turns, before it fixes on Ilse. Her smile rises like the sun over crystal waters of the harbour at dawn and she holds out her hands.

“Look at you!”

“Look at you!” Ilse retorts and they cling to each other with delighted laughter. It’s been nearly a year now since the wedding - and although they write, it’s not the same. She pushes back a cloud of dark hair with her cheek and whispers into one pointed ear, “I promise I don’t have any crabbed old bachelors lined up for you this time!”

Emily’s laughter peals out and she draws back to look into Ilse’s face. “I should hope not!” And she turns her head a little towards her husband and steps back, knowing what must come.

Ilse looks to the man she nearly married - the man she jilted on their wedding day all those years ago. If anything, Teddy is handsomer than ever - happiness agrees with him. But when their gazes meet, there’s a reserve in his eyes, the clinging remnants of stung pride still embedded in him like thorns in flesh.

She holds out her hands to him, well aware that Perry and Emily have left them this moment. The ones they love know them as well as they know themselves - if not better: any old wounds between them have been lanced, save for this one.

“Ilse.” His hands are warm on hers, and he kisses her on the cheek - stiff lips against her skin for one polite, angry moment before they soften into tender affection.

And when she draws back there’s forgiveness in his eyes.

“I’m not sorry,” she says, just to be sure.

“I know.” Teddy smiles and the expression is more real, more _there_ , than it ever was before he found his heart’s desire. Ilse knows how that goes. “Neither am I.”

-oOo-

Once she and Emily roamed the hills and woods around Blair Waters and Shrewsbury, children as only children could be. Now they’re responsible and respectable women - well, mostly - but the yen to roam remains.

The trail through the fields out the back of the house leads up the hill and through the woods - spruce and elm and pine all thrown in together, wound about with linnaea and scattered with clumps of scarlet asters. It’s a pleasant place for Ilse to haunt when she’s finished her chores and her reading and feels the need to be free.

It’s been some time since Emily was here to roam the woods with her.

Ilse can’t capture her childhood again - she’s not sure she’d want to live all her life again, even without regrets. The idea is nice, though - to be young and careless and free again.

“Isn’t there some saying about how we’re never truly free?”

“Love is the greatest bondage of them all,” Emily murmurs, and Ilse isn’t sure if it’s a quotation or one of Emily’s whimsies.

“You never said anything to me about Teddy."

It comes out more accusing that she intends.

“What was there to say?”

“That you were in love with Teddy? And don’t even think of telling me you weren’t, Emily Byrd Starr!”

“I wouldn’t,” Emily said reflectively, and a shadow passes across her face, old pain, old hurt. “What difference would it have made? So far as I knew, Teddy loved you, not me. What could it have done but made it uncomfortable for all of us?”

“Instead of just you?” Ilse huffs.

She remembers that summer - no longer running wild but running mad. Always moving, as though if she stopped to take a breath she’d fall over. And Emily there, bright and gay and helpful and tender - and never once giving Ilse any indication that her heart was breaking.

Since the news first came about Emily and Teddy, Ilse has done a lot of soul-searching.

“You should have told me.”

“Perhaps.” Emily shrugs. “I should have done a lot of things - things that I didn’t. Things that led to Teddy thinking I didn’t love him and led him to think he could be happy with you.”

“How close we came to ruining all our lives! Thank Heaven for Perry’s accident. Do you know sometimes I have nightmares about being married to Teddy. And then I wake up and grab Perry and hold on for dear life! Don’t make that face, Emily - marriage to Teddy - for me, that is - would have been a nightmare.”

Ilse has never been one to linger over what’s done. But sometimes the might have beens give her goosebumps. It even relieves her when Perry growls at her during these midnight wakings.

“Hardly a nightmare,” Emily protests.

“Just intolerable.”

“He cared for you in his own way.”

“Which says everything that needs to be said about it,” Ilse finishes. “On the whole, I prefer being _loved_. And so do you.”

They ramble along the forest trails, pausing to admire the autumnal forest here and there. An old fallen tree that, in _this_ light and from _this_ angle, looks like a knight of the Round Table, sleeping until a great trumpet blast should awaken him with clarion call. A fern-filled grotto in a hollow into which a shaft of sunlight pierces the shading canopy above, limning each fine-haired fern leaf with a luminous glow. The sunlight scattering across the sea to the east as they come out by the dunes of the beach, a trail of diamonds over the water.

Emily’s expression is enraptured, her eyes distant with the gleam of ‘the flash’, and Ilse leans against a fence and waits while her friend composes her descriptions in her head, the poetry of language for which E.B.Starr is becoming so well-known in her novels. There are some things she knows she can’t fight: Perry when he’s set his heart, morning sickness - which she hates, and Emily when she’s putting something together in her head.

When Emily rouses as though from a dream, and turns expectantly to Ilse, who inquires, “Back in the real world now?”

“All worlds are real if you know which door to open.”

And the look on Emily’s face is the one in Teddy’s portrait _The Smiling Girl_ \- the one that’s sitting in a Paris salon being admired by art aficionados from all over Europe. It’s a mysterious, haunting smile - the kind that drives men to death and destruction, and which lingers in the minds of the staid and commonplace as something entirely too fey.

“Well, the doors are opening for you, from the sound of it. I read the article in _The Mendicant’s Tale_ \- all about E.B.Starr and her ‘exquisite poetry-in-prose’. They are right, you know. ‘With her story, _Rainbow Gold_ , Canadian author E.B. Starr holds up an uncanny mirror to our collective faces and bids us watch ourselves in all our glory and our shame - both the beauty and horror of humanity in its greatest and worst moments.’”

“Too many polarities,” Emily murmurs as though quoting someone else’s criticism of the article, and her mouth curves with an impish smile.

“I wept my way through some sections - the night Sarah’s mother died? I bawled like a baby. Perry thought I’d gone stark raving mad until he saw what I was reading, and then we fought over who got to read it.”

“Who won?”

“He said he’d rather wait until I was done with it or else he’d never work out what page he’d been on before I moved the markers. But it was brilliant, Emily. Everything I know you wanted or hoped to write.”

Something like a wince passes across Emily’s face, but all she says is, “There’s always another Alpine path to follow.”

Ilse is tempted to ask, but friendship - and the knowledge that some places in Emily are closed, even to chums of old - keeps her silent on that topic.

Instead, she tells Emily of the doings in Charlottetown and the surrounding areas. The clumps of houses springing up in the communities beyond the city, the people residing there - cheek by jowl with their neighbours, and often behaving most un-neighbourly.

They’re nearly back at the road when Ilse pauses, only partly for a rest. They probably shouldn’t have come so far, but it was so nice to just wander the fields - as in days of yore, so to speak.

They rest themselves against a low stone wall and sit in happy and contented silence, until Ilse can keep quiet no longer.

“Emily, tell me truly - you’re happy?”

She looks happy - not just serene or elegant or aloof or _Murray-like_ or any of the words Ilse would use to describe her friend in the years since they were parted - after high school in Shrewsbury, when Emily was chained to New Moon by Aunt Elizabeth’s requirements for a Murray girl: to be refined and elegant and respectably married rather than going out to work a living.

Ilse considers it terrifying that she never missed _this_ Emily - the childhood friend whose storms and sunshine days were distinct to Ilse as Ilse’s own storms and sunshine days were to everyone else. Then again, Ilse was fleeing her own demons, too.

“That sounds suspiciously like Victorian concern, Ilse.” Emily dodges a little as Ilse swats at her shoulder, laughing. “Yes, dearest of Ilses, I’m happy.”

“Good,” Ilse says. “And I should be your _only_ Ilse.”


End file.
